The view from Felicia Willis' kitchen window is of a large, dingy manufacturing facility — to her, a reminder of the illness that killed her sister in December.

Willis' family moved to Eastern Heights subdivision in 1980, when Willis was still in high school. None of them knew, but they had just located next to a giant plume of contaminated groundwater.

Eastern Heights resident Belinda Kincaid battled two types of cancers during the 40 years she lived in the Grenada subdivision. She died in December.(Photo: Anna Wolfe)

Willis and her sister Belinda Kincaid, who was first diagnosed with uterine cancer when she was 24, then breast cancer two decades later, only discovered in 2016 that the cancer-causing chemicals from that plant had migrated right under their house.

Operators of the plant, which historically manufactured hubcaps, had been using and dumping a degreasing agent called trichloroethylene, or TCE. The state first ordered the responsible companies to begin a cleanup in 1990.

"I'm gonna miss her; it just seems so unreal ... I know she's in a better place now because she don't have to suffer anymore. No more doctor's appointments. No more nothing. She's resting," Willis said. "She told me that she thinks — well, no, she didn't say she thinks, she said she knows — that whatever's going on in this community has something to do with her health getting worse than it was before."

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Felicia Willis lives in Grenada, MS Eastern Heights subdivision, where she can see the old Grenada Manufacturing facility outside her kitchen window. Willis' family moved to Eastern Heights subdivision in 1980. Her sister Belinda Kincaid, who was first diagnosed with uterine cancer when she was 24, then breast cancer two decades later, only discovered in 2016 that the cancer-causing chemicals had migrated right under their house.
Sarah Warnock & Anna Wolfe/Clarion Ledger

In the last two years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has had an active presence in the neighborhood, explaining the history of the contamination to residents and overseeing the testing of soil and air samples inside residents' homes. Officials said they have found no immediate threat to residents' health.

The EPA became involved in the cleanup at Grenada Manufacturing in 1998. In two decades, Meritor, the company that assumed responsibility for the contamination, has taken steps to prevent the contaminants from entering a nearby creek.

However, it has not actually cleaned up the source of the contamination, both under the plant and at a nearby dumping site on Moose Lodge Road, a site under the oversight of the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality.

Felicia Willis has lived in Grenada's Eastern Heights subdivision, next to contamination from a manufacturing plant, nearly 40 years and watched her sister battle cancer. Belinda Kincaid died in December.(Photo: Anna Wolfe)

"I can tell you what it looks like to me," EPA Region 4 Superfund Director Franklin Hill told the Clarion Ledger on Tuesday. "It looks like a colossal failure from a regulatory standpoint."

"There's no other explanation for it. If you are regulating an entity where you know you have massive source contamination, you know, you need to address it. Just letting it kind of run amuck and hoping it's going to go away is not the answer. Putting up a permeable reactive barrier for it to flow through, to protect the creek — what about the massive source? The first meeting I went to with this group was two years ago. I sat in the room with them and I heard their presentation and I couldn't believe it. It wasn't my program, but I couldn't believe it."

While DEQ turned over Grenada Manufacturing clean-up oversight to EPA under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in the '90s, the state agency maintains regulatory control over the nearby contaminated site at Moose Lodge Road. Trudy Fisher, who headed DEQ from 2007 to 2014 and now works for Butler Snow, represents two of the companies residents have sued over the contamination.

EPA officials met with residents Tuesday evening to discuss its plans to put the contaminated Grenada site, including Eastern Heights, onto the National Priorities List, commonly known as a Superfund.

A Superfund designation would give the EPA greater resources and enforcement tools to direct the responsible companies to properly address the contamination. If they refuse to comply, the EPA can conduct a cleanup itself, and compel the companies to reimburse the agency later.

Felicia Willis stands on her porch in Eastern Heights subdivision. Companies responsible for cleaning up the contamination at the Grenada Manufacturing facility next door had to install a monitoring well in Willis' front yard to test groundwater chemicals, which have migrated into the neighborhood.(Photo: Anna Wolfe)

For some residents, the help comes too late. In general, they're not comforted by lengthy, complex cleanup ahead of them, nor are they satisfied by promises that the EPA will investigate the chemicals' potential health impacts.

They're looking for accountability.

"You're saying that you can come in now and you can just fix it. What about the last 40 years of exposure? What about what's going on in these bodies right now? What about the fact the property is worthless now?" resident Shay Harris said to Hill with a crowd of around 100 other residents and former plant workers behind her.

Hill, responsible for the Superfund sites in eight Southeastern states, grew up in Shuqualak, an east-central Mississippi town of roughly 500 and pronounced "sugar lock." As a kid, he was passionate about fishing and hunting, as he is today.

So when Harris described the ditch she played in during her childhood, covered in a green substance that ran off from the plant to her neighborhood when it rained, Hill said he knew what she was talking about.

"Two years ago, when we found out what it was, can you imagine the shock and the horror that people in this neighborhood felt?" Harris told Hill.

"That little green lagoon you're talking about, I thought was one of the best fishing holes in town," Hill said, referencing the unsanitary environment in his own hometown and holding back tears. "So I understand where you're coming from, and I'll just leave it at that."

Harris suffered tumors when she was younger and in her early 20s, she discovered a tumor in her spinal nerve that grew to "the size of a cantaloupe."

Harris' brother, James, has an autoimmune disease, and "I thought I was healthy as a bull," he said at the meeting.

Johnnie Williams, another Eastern Heights resident, lost her son to liver disease when he was 17. Williams' husband, Jerry, worked at the plant when it was operated by Rockwell International, from 1970 to 1975, and even said he transported chemicals from the plant to the dumping sites north of the plant and on Moose Lodge Road. Meritor is a spin-off of Rockwell.

An engineering firm hired to conduct testing in the community visited Willis and Kincaid's home two years ago, dug up the flooring in the hallway, drilled a hole through the slab, and tested the soil vapor for TCE. They did the same in other homes along the eastern border of Eastern Heights and found that TCE existed at levels lower than those set by the federal government based on the exposure that could affect a person's health.

This is today, when the only pathway of exposure between the contaminated groundwater and humans is if the chemicals travel up through the ground as a vapor. Years ago, the community's drinking water came from nearby wells, residents informed EPA officials at the meeting.

"I will never begin to say that no one has ever been exposed," Hill said.

Of 225 longtime residents of the neighborhood, roughly 70 have been diagnosed with cancer.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an agency under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, will be working alongside EPA in the community to study health concerns. A representative from the agency, Sue Casteel, said they are gathering data to compare the prevalence of specific cancers in Grenada to other populations.

"One of the challenges we have here in this community is it's a small area. Not that many people live in it," Casteel said. "So it may be, and it probably will be, that they won't be able to specifically look at just the people in Eastern Heights to see if their cancer rates are different than the state or nation cancer rates."

Attorneys who are already representing the residents in a federal lawsuit against the companies claiming property damages are also gathering stories and evidence to bring suit over the residents' health issues.

Proving that chemical exposure caused the health concerns in Eastern Heights will be difficult, but the residents have little doubt.

"I had a 10-year-old child I had to send away to save her," resident Cammie Harges said at the meeting.